One
winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a Los Angeles
street-corner clinic where 40 day laborers had lined up to be tested for
AIDS. One worker, Omar Sierra, had just taken his seat, and a nurse had
inserted the needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran
across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, tore off the tourniquet,
pulled the needle out of his vein and ran.
Sierra escaped and made it home. Shaken by his experience and determined
never to forget his friends who were deported, he wrote a song.

I'm
going to sing you a story, friends
that will make you cry,
how one day in front of K-Mart
the Migra came down on us,
sent by the sheriff
of this very same place . . .

We
don't understand why,
we don’t know the reason,
why there is so much
discrimination against us.
In the end we'll wind up
all the same in the grave.

With
this verse I leave you,
I'm tired of singing,
hoping the migra
won't come after us again,
because in the end, we all have to work.

Working – A Criminal Act

Sierra
states an obvious truth about people in the U.S. without immigration papers:
“We all have to work.” Yet work has become a crime for the
undocumented. That Hollywood raid took place 13 years ago, but since then
immigration enforcement against workers has grown much more widespread,
with catastrophic consequences. In the last eight years of the Bush administration
in particular, a succession of raids treated undocumented workers as criminals.

A
year ago in Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents
(“the migra”) arrived at Micro Solutions, a circuit board
assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley. Unsuspecting workers were first
herded into the plant’s cafeteria. Then immigration agents told
those who were citizens to line up on one side of the room. Then they
told the workers who had green cards to go over to the same side. Finally,
as one worker said, “it just left us.” The remaining workers
– those who were neither citizens nor visa holders -- were put into
vans, and taken off to the migra jail.

Some
women were later released to care for their kids, but had to wear ankle
bracelets, and couldn’t work. How were they supposed to pay rent?
Where would they get money to buy food?

On
May 12, 2008, ICE agents raided the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in
Postville, Iowa. They sent 388 Guatemalan young people to the National
Cattle Congress, a livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away. In
a makeshift courtroom workers went in chains before a judge who’d
helped prosecutors design plea agreements five months before the raid
even took place. The workers had given the company Social Security numbers
that were either invented, or belonged to someone else. The judge and
prosecutor told workers they’d be charged with aggravated identity
theft, which carries a two-year prison jolt, and held without bail. If
they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security number, however, they
would serve just five months, and be deported immediately afterwards.

Many
of these young people spoke only Mam or Qanjobal, the indigenous language
of the region of Guatemala from which they came, so even with Spanish
translation they understood little of the skewed process. They had no
real options anyway, and agreed to the five months in a federal lockup
and were then expelled from the country. One of them was a young worker
who’d been beaten with a meat hook by a supervisor. Lacking papers,
he was afraid to complain. After the raid, he went to prison with the
others. The supervisor stayed working on the line.

As
in Los Angeles, women released to care for their children couldn’t
work, they had no way to pay rent or buy food, their husbands or brothers
were in prison or deported, and they were held up to ostracism in this
tiny town. Had it not been for St. Brigida’s Catholic Church and
local activists, the women and children would have been left hungry and
homeless as they waited months for their own hearings and deportations.

They
say it’s just “illegals” – that makes this politically
acceptable.

A
year ago, ICE agents raided a Howard Industries plant in Laurel, Mississippi,
sending 481 workers to a privately-run detention center in Jena, Louisiana,
and releasing 106 women in ankle bracelets. Workers were incarcerated
with no idea of where they were being held, and weren’t charged
or provided lawyers for days. they slept on concrete floors, and went
on a hunger strike after a week of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Patricia
Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), called
the raid political. “They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of
the state,” she declared. “The political establishment here
is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics, and what the electorate
might look like in 20 years.”

She
means that African-Americans are moving back to Mississippi, and now make
up over 35% of the population. In ten years, immigrants will make up another
10%. MIRA and the state’s legislative black caucus have a plan –
combine those votes with unions and progressive whites, and Mississippi
can finally get rid of the power structure that’s governed in Jackson
since Reconstruction.

The
Howard Industries raid was intended to drive a wedge into the heart of
that political coalition – to stop any possibility for change.

ICE
says these raids protect U.S. citizens and legal residents against employers
who hire undocumented workers in order to lower wages and working conditions.
But very often immigration raids are used against workers efforts when
they organize and protest those same conditions. At the big Smithfield
plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, where workers spent 16 years trying
to join the union, the company tried to fire 300 people, including the
immigrant union leadership, saying it had discovered that their Social
Security numbers were no good. Workers stopped the lines for three days,
and won temporary reinstatement for those who were fired. But then the
migra conducted two raids, and 21 workers went to prison for using numbers
that belonged to someone else. The fear the raids created was compared
by one organizer to a neutron bomb. It took two years for the union campaign
to recover.

Since
the end of the Bush administration, immigration authorities say they will
follow a softer policy. Instead of raids, they say they’ll implement
a system for checking the legal status of workers – an electronic
database called E-Verify. People working with bad Social Security numbers
will be fired. In October, 2000 young women in the Los Angeles garment
factory of American Apparel were fired. And in November 1200 janitors
were fired in Minneapolis.

The
Department of Homeland Security says it’s auditing the records of
654 companies nationwide, to find the names of undocumented workers. Will
hundreds of thousands more get fired? What kind of economic recovery goes
with firing thousands of workers?

Workplace
raids, firings and E-verify are all means to enforce employer sanctions
– the part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that
said, for the first time, that employers had to check the immigration
status of workers. The law essentially made it a federal crime for an
undocumented person to work. Those who call for stricter enforcement say
sanctions were never implemented, and point out that only a handful of
employers were ever fined. But tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands
of workers have been fired for not having papers. No one keeps track of
the number – these people don’t count.

ICE
says sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal
workers to drive down wages,” -- those who pay illegal workers substandard
wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.

Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure
them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however.
And that’s not who ICE targets anyway. American Apparel pays better
than most garment factories, although workers had to work fast and hard
to earn that pay. In Minneapolis, the 1200 fired janitors at ABM belong
to SEIU Local 26 and get a higher wage than non-union workers –
and had to strike and fight to win it.

ICE is still targeting the same set of employers the Bush raids went after
– union companies like Howard Industries, or organizing drives like
those at Smithfield. The Agriprocessors raid came less than a year after
workers there tried to organize. At Howard Industries in Mississippi,
the migra conducted the biggest raid of all in the middle of union contract
negotiations. ICE is punishing undocumented workers who earn too much,
or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.
And despite the notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers
who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were
rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution. So this
policy really only hurts workers.

What
purpose does criminalization serve? In part it serves a huge bureaucracy.
With 15,000 agents, ICE has become the second largest enforcement arm
of the Federal government. Private detention centers have been built across
the country, operated by companies like Geo Corporation, formerly called
Wackenhut, and before that, Pinkertons. Janet Napolitano, DHS secretary,
recently announced plans to build two new detention supercenter. About
350,000 people were detained for immigration violations last year, and
at any one time about 35,000 people were in detention (read: prison).

But
the driving force behind enforcement is deeper than contracts and jobs.

Open the Front Door, Close the Back Door

Former
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said “there's an
obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the
front door and you shut the back door.” Chertoff means by “opening
the front door” that he wants people to come to the U.S. as contract
workers, recruited by employers using visas that say a worker can only
come to work. This is the logic and requirement for every guest worker
program, going back to the braceros. And to make people come only through
this employment-based system, he’ll “close the back door,”
by making walking through the desert across the border, or working outside
of this contract labor system, a crime punished, not just by deportation,
but by detention and prison.

People
coming as contract labor never become citizens, vote or hold power. That’s
very convenient in Mississippi, for instance, where employers need the
labor of immigrants, but are afraid of what will happen if they vote.
And by no coincidence, the state employs more guest workers per capita
than any other. Mississippi recently passed a state employer sanctions
law, with a $10,000 fine and five years in jail for working without being
“authorized.”

E-Verify,
the high-tech immigration database endorsed by both the Bush and Obama
administrations, is only the latest idea for enforcing this kind of criminalization.
The purpose of E-Verify, raids, firings and every other kind of workplace
immigration enforcement, is the basic criminalization of work -- if you
have no papers, it is a crime to have a job.

So
you stand on the street corner, a truck stops to pick up laborers, and
you get in. You work all day in the sun until you’re so tired you
can hardly go back to your room. This is a crime. You do it to send money
home to your family and the people who depend on you. This is a crime
too.

How
many criminals like this are there? The Pew Hispanic Trust says there
are 12 million people without papers here in the U.S.

But
it’s not just here. Manu Chao wrote a whole CD of songs about this:
Clandestino. He sings about people going from Morocco to Spain. Turkey
to Germany. Jamaica to London. There are over 200 million people, all
over the world, living outside the countries where they were born. If
all the world’s “illegal workers” got together in one
place there would be enough people for ten Mexico Cities or fifteen Los
Angeleses.

If
working is a crime, then workers are criminals. And if workers become
criminals, proponents of this system say, they’ll go home. That’s
the basic justification for all workplace immigration enforcement.

But
is anyone going home? No one is leaving, because there’s no job
to go home to.

Since
1994, six million Mexicans have come to live in the U.S. Millions came
without visas, because it wasn’t possible for them to get one.

All
over the world people are moving, from poor countries to rich ones. The
largest Salvadoran city in the world is Los Angeles. More than half the
world’s sailors come from the Philippines. More migrants go from
the country to the city in China than cross borders in all the rest of
the world combined.

So
many people from Guatemala are living in the U.S. that one neighborhood
in Los Angeles is now called Little San Miguel. San Miguel Acatan was
the site of the worst massacre of indigenous people by the U.S.-armed
Guatemalan Army in that country’s civil war, in 1982. Now more San
Migueleños live in Los Angeles than in San Miguel.

The
economic pressures causing displacement and migration are reaching into
the most remote towns and villages in Mexico, where people still speak
languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas –
Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui, Chatino, Purepecha, Nahuatl. There is no community
in Mexico that does not have family members in the U.S.

Why Are So Many People Displaced?

NAFTA
is just one element of the changes that have transformed the Mexican economy
in the interests of foreign investors and wealthy Mexican partners. The
treaty let huge U.S. companies, like Archer Daniels Midland, sell corn
in Mexico for a price lower than what it cost small farmers in Oaxaca
to grow it. Big U.S.. companies get huge subsidies from Congress -- $2
billion in the last farm bill.. But the World Bank and NAFTA’s rules
dictated that subsidies for Mexican farmers had to end. This was not the
creation of a “level playing field,” despite all the propaganda.

In
Cananea, a small town in the Sonora mountains and site of one of the world’s
largest copper mines, miners have been on strike for two years. Grupo
Mexico, a multinational corporation that was virtually given the mine
in one of the infamous privatizations of former President Carlos Salinas,
wants to cut labor costs by eliminating hundreds of jobs, busting the
miners’ union, and blacklisting its leaders. If miners lose the
strike and their jobs, the border is only 50 miles north.

If
you were a miner with a busted union and no job to support your family,
where would you go? When Cananea miners lost the last strike against job
cuts in 1998, over 800 were blacklisted, and many wound up working in
Tucson, Phoenix and Los Angeles. No wonder the current strike has been
going on for over two years. Miners are fighting to stay home, in Cananea,
in Mexico.

The
Mexican government just sent in the army to occupy all the power plants
in Mexico City, dissolved the state-owned Power and Light Company (Luz
y Fuerza), and fired its 44,000 employees. This act threatens to destroy
the union there, one of the country’s oldest and most democratic.
This is a step towards selling off Mexico’s electrical grid to foreign,
private investors, just as the telephones, airlines, ports, railroads
and factories have all been privatized over the last two decades. Where
will the fired electrical workers go? If they don’t win their current
battle with the government, they’ll follow many of their predecessors
north.

NAFTA,
and the economic reforms promoted by the U.S. and Mexican governments,
helped big companies get rich by keeping wages low, by giving them subsidies
and letting them push farmers into bankruptcy, by privatizing state enterprises
and allowing cuts in the workforce and working conditions. But those are
the changes that make it hard for families to survive: Low wages. Can’t
farm any more. Laid off to cut costs. Factory privatized and union busted.

Salinas
promised Mexicans cheap food if NAFTA was approved and corn imports flooded
the country. Now the price of tortillas is three times what it was when
the treaty passed. That’s great for Grupo Maseca, Mexico’s
monopoly tortilla producer (and Archer Daniels Midland sits on its board.
And it’s great for WalMart, now Mexico’s largest retailer.
But if you can’t afford to buy those tortillas, then you go where
you can buy them.

The
advocates of economic liberalization said an economy of maquiladoras and
low wages would produce jobs on the border. But today, hundreds of thousands
of workers there have lost their jobs – when the recession began
in the U.S., people stopped buying the products made in border factories.
Even while they’re working, the wages of maquiladora workers are
so low – $4-6/day – that it takes half a day’s pay to
buy a gallon of milk. Most live in cardboard houses on streets with no
pavement or sewer system. When they lose their jobs, and the border is
a few blocks away, where do you think will they go? If you had no job
or food for your family, what would you do?

And
when people protest, the government brings in the police and the army
to protect order and investment. People are beaten, as the teachers were
in Oaxaca in 2006. After the army filled Oaxaca’s jails, how many
more people had to leave?

When
Honduran President Manuel Zelaya simply raised the minimum wage to give
families a better future, not as migrants, but in Honduras, the U.S.-trained
military kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on an airplane and flew
him out of the country. How many people will leave Honduras, because the
door to a sustainable future at home has been closed?

The
lack of human rights itself is a factor contributing to migration, since
it makes it more difficult, even impossible, to organize for change. Unequal
trade agreements and military intervention don’t stop the flow of
migrants – they produce it by displacing people – making it
impossible for them to survive without leaving home. Immigration laws
then regulate this flow of people.

Migration
is not an accidental byproduct of free trade. The economies of the U.S.
and wealthy countries depend on migration, on the labor provided by a
constant flow of migrants. Congress and the administration aren’t
trying to stop migration. Nothing can, not with trade agreements like
NAFTA and CAFTA and the economic policies they represent. Immigration
enforcement does not keep people from crossing the border, or prevent
them from working. Instead, immigration policy determines the status of
people once they’re here. It enforces inequality among workers in
rights, and economic and social status. That inequality then produces
lower wages and higher profits

U.S. immigration policy has historically been designed to supply labor
to employers, at a manageable cost, imposed by employers. And at its most
overt, that labor supply policy has made workers vulnerable to employers,
who can withdraw the right to stay in the country by firing them.

This
is not an extremist view. Recently that gang of revolutionaries, the Council
on Foreign Relations, proposed two goals for U.S. immigration policy.
“We should reform the legal immigration system,” it advocated,
“so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately
to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” This
essentially calls for using migration to supply labor at competitive,
or low, wages.
“We should restore the integrity of immigration laws,” the
Council went on to say, “through an enforcement regime that strongly
discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal
system.” This couples an enforcement regime like the one at present,
with its raids and firings, to that labor supply system.

To
employers, this system is not broken – it works well.

About
12 million people live in the U.S. without immigration documents. Another
26-28 million were born elsewhere, and are citizens or visa-holders. That’s
almost 40 million people. If everyone went home tomorrow, would there
be fruit and vegetables on the shelves at Safeway? Who would cut up the
cows and pigs in meatpacking plants? Who would clean the offices of New
York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago?

Immigrants
are not the only workers in our workforce, the only people willing to
work, or the only people who need jobs. Our workforce includes African
American, Native American, Asian American and Chicano families who have
contributed their labor for hundreds of years. The vast majority of white
people – the descendents of European immigrants – are workers
too. We all work. We all need to work, to put bread on the table for our
families. But without the labor of immigrants, the system would stop.

Those
companies using that labor, however – the grape growers in Delano
or the owners of office buildings in Century City, or the giant Blackstone
group that owns hotels across the country – do not pay the actual
cost of producing the workforce they rely on. Who pays for the needs of
workers’ families in the towns and countries from which they come?
Who builds the schools in the tiny Oaxacan villages that send their young
people into California’s fields? Who builds the homes for the families
of the meatpacking workers of Nebraska? Who pays for the doctor when the
child of a Salvadoran janitor working in Los Angeles gets sick? The growers
and the meatpackers and the building owners pay for nothing. They don’t
even pay taxes in the countries from which their workers come, and some
don’t pay taxes here either. So who pays the cost of producing and
maintaining their workforce?

The
workers pay for everything with the money they send home. Structural adjustment
policies require countries like Mexico or the Philippines to cut the government
budget for social services, so remittances pay for whatever social services
those communities now get. For employers, that’s a very cheap system.

Here
in the U.S. it’s cheap too. Workers without papers pay taxes and
Social Security, but are barred from the benefits. For them there’s
no unemployment insurance, no disability pay if they get sick, and no
retirement benefits. Workers fought for these social benefits, and won
them in the New Deal. For people without papers, the New Deal never happened.
Even legal residents with green cards can’t get many Social Security
benefits. If they take these benefits away from immigrants, it wont be
long before they come after people born here.

Why
can’t everyone get a Social Security number? After all, we want
people to be part of the system. All workers, the undocumented included,
get old and injured. Should people live on dog food after a lifetime of
work? The purpose of Social Security is to assure dignity and income to
the old and injured. The system should not be misused to determine immigration
status and facilitate witch-hunts, firings and deportations for workers
without it.

Wages
for most immigrants are so low people can hardly live on them. There’s
a big difference in wages between a day laborer and a longshoreman --
$8.25/hour minimum wage in San Francisco, where a dockworker gets over
$25, plus benefits. If employers had to pay low wage workers, including
immigrants, the wages of longshoremen, the lives of working families would
improve immeasurably. And it can happen. Before people on the waterfront
organized the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they were like
day labors. hired every morning in a humiliating shapeup where each person
competed for a job with dozens of others. Dockworkers were considered
bums. Now they own apartment houses. It’s the union that did it.

But
if employers had to raise the wages of immigrants to the level of longshoremen,
it would cost them a lot. Just the difference between the minimum wage
received by 12 million undocumented workers and the average U.S. wage
might well be over $80 billion a year. No wonder organizing efforts among
immigrant workers meet such fierce opposition.

But
immigrants are fighters. In 1992 undocumented drywallers stopped Southern
California residential construction for a year from Santa Barbara to the
Mexican border. They’ve gone on strike at factories, office buildings,
laundries, hotels and fields. Those unions today that are growing are
often those that have made an alliance with immigrant workers, and know
that they will fight for better conditions. In fact, the battles fought
by immigrants over the last twenty years made the unions of Los Angeles
strong today, and changed the politics of the city. In city after city,
a similar transformation is possible or already underway.

So
unions should make a commitment too. In 1999 the AFL-CIO held an historic
convention in Los Angeles, and there unions said they would fight to get
rid of the law that makes work a crime. Unions said they’d fight
to protect the right of all workers to organize, immigrants included.
Labor should live up to that promise. Today unions are fighting for the
Employee Free Choice Act, intended to make it easier and quicker for workers
to organize. That would help all workers, immigrants included. But if
12 million people have no right to their jobs at all, and are breaking
the law simply by working, how will they use the rights that EFCA is designed
to protect? Unions and workers need both labor law reform and immigration
reform that decriminalizes work.

Employers
and the wealthy love immigrants and hate them. They want and need people’s
labor, but they don’t want to pay. And what better way not to pay
than to turn workers into criminals?

Creating Illegality

This
is an old story. The use of migration as a supply of criminalized low-paid,
or even unpaid labor began when this country began. Who were the first
“illegals”? They were Africans displaced by the most brutal
means, kidnapped, chained and marched to the coast, put on ships and taken
across the middle passage to the Americas. And for what purpose? To provide
labor on plantations, but not as equal people – not even as people
at all. When the U.S. Constitution was adopted, a slave was counted as
three-fifths of a human being, not because planters intended to give them
three-fifths of a white person’s rights, but so that slave masters
could get more representatives in Congress.

Some
of the nation’s first laws defined who could be enslaved and who
couldn’t. The “drop of African blood” defined who was
legal and who wasn’t. When Illinois and Indiana came into the Union,
as free states, their first laws said a person of African descent couldn’t
reside there. Were there no free Black people living in those territories?
Did they not therefore become “illegal”?

That
concept of illegality was then applied to other people, for the same purpose.
Chinese immigrants were brought from Toishan under contract to work on
the railroad, and drain the Sacramento/San Joaquin River delta. Then the
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act forbade their continued immigration, because
under U.S. nationality law, they could never become citizens. At the time
the law said the Chinese had no right to be here, there were already thousands
of Chinese migrants in California, and even Idaho.

In
the early 1900s California’s grower-dominated legislature made it
a crime for Filipinos to marry women who were not Filipinas. At the same
time, immigration of women from the Philippines to the mainland was very
difficult. For the Filipino farm workers of the 1930s and 40s and 50s,
it was virtually a crime to have a family. Many men stayed single until
their 50s or 60s, living in labor camps, moving and working wherever the
growers needed their labor.

During
the bracero program from 1942 to 1964 growers recruited workers from Mexico,
who could only come under contract, and had to leave the country at the
end of the harvest. They called the braceros legal, but what kind of legality
has people living behind barbed wire in camps, traveling and working only
where the growers wanted? If braceros went on strike, they were deported.
Part of their wages were withheld, supposedly to guarantee their return
to Mexico. Half a century later they’re still fighting to recover
the lost money.

But
everyone fought to stay. The Chinese endured the burning of Chinatowns
in Salinas and San Francisco. Filipinos had to fight just for the right
to have a family. Many braceros just walked out of the labor camps, and
kept living and working underground for thirty years, until they could
got legal status from the amnesty of 1986.

Immigration
policy based on producing a labor supply for employers always has two
consequences. Displacement of communities abroad becomes an unspoken policy,
because it produces workers. And inequality becomes an official policy.

Almost
two hundred years after the civil war eliminated much of dejure inequality
written into law, defacto inequality is still very much with us. But today
immigration law, with its category of illegality, is reinstituting inequality
under law. Calling someone an “illegal” doesn’t refer
to an illegal act. It’s not the border that makes people illegal
any more than the middle passage made people slaves. Slavery was created
on the slave block and in the plantation. Today’s illegality is
also created within the borders, by a legal system that excludes people
from normal rights and social benefits.

Illegal
status is created here. All the immigration reform bills in congress share
the assumption that immigrants, even those with visas, shouldn’t
be the equals of the people in the community around them, with the same
rights. For those without visas, the exclusion and inequality is even
fiercer. And this is not a defacto exclusion or denial of rights. It is
dejure denial, written into law, that justifies the raid in Laurel, the
firings in Los Angeles, or the ankle bracelets in Postville.

Today
the U.S. faces a basic choice in direction for its immigration policy.
There is a corporate agenda on migration, promoted by powerful voices
in Washington DC, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the employers’
lobby, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (think Wal-Mart, Marriott,
or Tyson Foods). They propose managing the flow of migration with new
guest worker programs, and increased penalties against those who try to
migrate and work outside this system. Some of their proposals also contain
a truncated legalization for the undocumented, but one that would disqualify
most people or have them wait for years for visas, while removing employer
liability for the undocumented workers they’ve already hired.

But,
Washington lobbyists ask, wouldn’t guest worker programs be preferable
to what we have now? The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report, Close
to Slavery, documents that today’s braceros are routinely cheated
of wages and overtime. Workers recruited from India to work in a Mississippi
shipyard paid $15-20,000 for each visa. The company cut their promised
wages, and fired their leader, Joseph Jacobs, when workers protested.
If workers do protest, they’re put on a blacklist. The Department
of Labor under Bush never decertified a guest worker contractor for labor
violations, and said the blacklist is legal. When Rafael Santiago was
sent by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to Monterrey to monitor hiring
by the North Carolina Growers Association, to eliminate the blacklist
and end contractor corruption, his office was broken into, and he was
tied up, tortured and killed.

No
employer hires guest workers in order to pay more. They hire them to keep
wages low.

That’s
one possible direction – away from equality and the expansion of
rights..

Undoing Inequality

Our
own history tells us that a different direction is not only possible,
but was partially achieved by the civil rights movement. In 1964, heroes
of the Chicano movement like Bert Corona, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez
and Dolores Huerta forced Congress to end the bracero program. The next
year, Mexicans and Filipinos went out on strike in the fields of Coachella
and Delano, and the United Farm Workers was born.

The
following year, in 1965, those leaders, together with many others, went
back to Congress. Give us a law, they said, that doesn’t make workers
into braceros or criminals behind barbed wire, into slaves for growers.
Give us a law that says our families are what’s important, our communities.
That was how we won the family preference system. That’s why, once
you have a green card, you can petition for your mother and father, or
your children, to join you in the U.S. We didn’t have that before.
The civil rights movement won that law.

That
fight is not over. In fact, we have to fight harder now than ever. Native-born
workers and settled immigrant communities see the growth of an employment
system based on low wages and insecurity as a threat. It fosters competition
among workers for jobs, and expands the part of the workforce with the
lowest income and the fewest rights. It’s not hard for people to
see the impact of inequality and growing poverty, even if they get confused
about its cause.

But
we don’t have to assume that fear is hardwired into us, or that
we can’t overcome it. Mainstream newspapers said people applauded
in the Laurel plant when the immigrants were arrested and taken out in
handcuffs. But after the arrests, Black workers came out of the gate and
embraced the immigrant women sitting outside in their ankle bracelets,
demanding their unpaid wages. African American women offered to bring
food to Mexican mothers, and supported their demand for back wages.

At
Smithfield in North Carolina, two immigration raids and 300 firings scared
workers so badly that their union drive stopped. But then Mexicans and
African Americans together brought the union in. They found a common cause
by saying to each other that they all needed better wages and conditions,
that they all had a right to work, and that they union would fight for
the job of anyone, immigrant or native-born.

Unions
know that immigrants can be fighters, like other workers. In 1992 drywallers
stopped home construction for a year with a strike that extended from
Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Immigrants, including the undocumented,
have gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels
and fields. Some unions today are growing, and they’re often those
that know immigrant workers will fight for better wages and conditions.
The battles fought by immigrants over the last twenty years are helping
to create political power in cities like Los Angeles.

In
recognition of that process, and of their own self-interest, unions made
a commitment at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. They said they
would fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime, and to protect
the right of all workers to organize. Labor should live up to that promise.

So What Do We Want?

First,
we want legalization, giving 12 million people residence rights and green
cards, so they can live like normal human beings. We do not want immigration
used as a cheap labor supply system, with workers paying off recruiters,
and, once here, frightened that they’ll be deported if they lose
their jobs.

We
need to get rid of the laws that make immigrants criminals and working
a crime. No more detention centers, no more ankle bracelets, no more firings
and no-match letters, and no more raids. We need equality and rights.
All people in our communities should have the same rights and status.

We
have to make sure that those who say they advocate for immigrants aren’t
really advocating for low wages. That the decision-makers of Washington
DC won’t plunge families in Mexico, El Salvador or Colombia into
poverty, to force a new generation of workers to leave home and go through
the doors of furniture factories and laundries, office buildings and packing
plants, onto construction sites, or just into the gardens and nurseries
of the rich.

Families
in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or the Philippines deserve a decent
life too. They have a right to survive, a right to not migrate. To make
that right a reality, they need jobs and productive farms, good schools
and healthcare. Our government must stop negotiating trade agreements
like NAFTA and CAFTA, and instead prohibit the use of trade and economic
policy that causes poverty and displacement.

Those
people who do choose to come here to work deserve the same things that
every other worker does. We all have the same rights, and the same needs
– jobs, schools, medical care, a decent place to live, and the right
to walk the streets or drive our cars without fear.

Major
changes in immigration policy are not possible if we don’t fight
at the same time for these other basic needs: jobs, education, housing,
healthcare, justice. But these are things that everyone needs, not just
immigrants. And if we fight together, we can stop raids, and at the same
time create a more just society for everyone, immigrant and non-immigrant
alike

Is
this possible?

In
1955, at the height of the cold war, braceros and farm workers didn’t
think change would ever come. Growers had all the power, and farm workers
none. Ten years later we had a new immigration law protecting families,
and the bracero program was over. A new union for farm workers was on
strike in Delano.

We
can have an immigration system that respects human rights. We can stop
deportations. We can win security for working families on both sides of
our borders.